Whether or not you are a fan of U.S. football – it was really hard to avoid this huge sports event on February 5. In addition to the actual game, it’s the Super Bowl commercials that – besides being very expensive to air – usually drive a lot of load on the websites of the companies that run their ads. The question is whether the millions of dollars spent really drive consumers to these websites and make them do business with them. As we won't get an answer from the top brands that advertised about the actual conversion rates we can look at the End User Experience and performance of their websites while these ads were aired. By analyzing the data that we can get through continuous synthetic monitoring combined with deep dive browser diagnostics, we’ll be able to see whether their web application was actually able to handle the load and didn't leave too many of these users with a bad user experience.
Migration failures may occur when migrating application run time configurations for large complex network deployment to higher version of WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Network Deployment(ND) on AIX platform. The WebSphere migration utilities such as WASPreUpgrade and WASPostUpgrade provide the necessary mechanism to move the existing configuration information such as older defaults and settings including ports, JVM parameters etc from previous version to higher version of the WebSphere Application Server. These migration failures may happen due to several reasons such as any shortcomings in the procedure or a peculiar deployment topology chosen by the customer or due to any underlying network and synchronization failures from configurations in WebSphere or AIX.
There are literally thousands of different REST APIs available today, and new APIs are being created and exposed daily. There are API aggregator sites such as apigee.com and programmableweb.com that collect APIs from various sites. apigee.com makes available a very nice API console where a REST service can be tested. Testing a REST service is cool but what if you wanted to build a mobile app using it? Tiggzi, the cloud-based mobile app builder comes with a REST API console and makes it super easy to connect to any REST API. Check it out: 1. Enter any REST service URL. In this example I use Cocoafish Location API. Now, this is the most awesome part. You can use any REST URL here. You can of course do get, post, delete and push.
When Sun’s developers created Java, they tried to keep the syntax for Java similar to the syntax for C++ so it would be easy for C++ programmers to learn Java. In addition, they designed Java so its applications can be run on any computer platform. In contrast, C++ needs to have a specific compiler for each platform. Java was also designed to automatically handle many operations involving the creation and destruction of memory. This is a key reason why it’s easier to develop programs and write bug-free code with Java than with C++. To provide these features, the developers of Java had to sacrifice some speed (or performance) when compared to C++. For many types of applications, however, Java’s relative slowness is not an issue. Microsoft’s Visual C# language is similar to Java in many ways. Like Java, C# uses a syntax that’s similar to C++ and that automatically handles memory operations. However, in practice, C# code only runs on Windows. Because of that, C# is a good choice for developing applications for a Windows-only environment. However, Java is a better choice if you need to develop crossplatform applications.
As predictably as the sun rising in the east, Oracle Monday rejected the slashed $272 million award for damages that the presiding federal court judge decided it should get from SAP for its admitted copyright infringement rather than the $1.3 billion the jury awarded Oracle in late 2010 following a captivating and highly publicized trial. Oracle told the court it wants the new trial it was offered to “vindicate” the jury and its property rights as well as to avoid risking its right to appeal the court’s decision. SAP, which agreed to pay a $20 million fine to the US government to avoid criminal prosecution, said it was “disappointed.” Calling the jury award “grossly excessive,” Judge Phyllis Hamilton last September found Oracle only proved actual damages of $272 million. SAP’s third-party maintenance arm TomorrowNow illegally downloaded reams of Oracle software and customer-support documents before it was shut down in 2008.
Anyone that's managing an enterprise IT with aging or outdated client/server systems is starting to feel the heat. Soon, their systems and applications will be obsolete and unsupported. At the same time, the industry as whole is seeking the fastest gateway to the latest .NET, HTML5 and mobile deployments including SaaS models. Right about now, there will be a knock on your door with team members offering their advice as to what you should do to ‘keep up' with the latest trends and supported architectures. Here are three of the buzzwords they will have probably used, and what they actually mean.
Although I started with Cold Fusion for application development, I did plenty brochureware sites with HTML. I believe the version was HTML 2.0 for IE 2.0. I lived in the browser world for years doing Cold Fusion, ASP, and HTML sites. When winforms and Smart Client with Web Services emerged I changed my religion. I have been avoiding the browser whenever possible since. For the past couple of years my extent of using simple HTML has been limited to writing blogs and book reviews. Simple HTML means no ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC. With all the HTML5 hype I figured I would take some time and read a few books on it. This one is my third and I have one more on the way.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington Monday punctured Google’s hopes of hiding the telltale Lindholm e-mail from the jury when Oracle finally drags Google and Android before the bar to answer charges of infringing its Java copyrights and patents. The appeals court sided with the district court that has already told Google six times that the highly compromising e-mail couldn’t be suppressed. Neither court bought Google’s story that it was an artifact protected by attorney-client privilege that was turned over in discovery to Oracle by mistake. The appeal court found that Google engineer Tim Lindholm “was responding to a request from Google’s management, not Google’s attorneys.” It said the message concerned a negotiation strategy, not a legal strategy and “does not evidence any sort of infringement or invalidity analysis.”
SeaMicro, the ambitious start-up that has been building so-called microservers out of low-power Intel Atom chips, has started building microservers out of low-voltage quad-core Intel Xeon chips using the same architecture its Atom systems use. The development is called the SeaMicro SM10000-XE. Needless to say, it’s the first fabric-based Xeon microserver ever made. It’s also supposed to be the most energy-efficient, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Xeon server now available, period. A single SM10000-XE replaces 32 dual-socket servers, but draws half the power and takes up a third the space without any changes to operating systems, applications or management tools. It eliminates layers of Ethernet switches, server management devices and expensive load balancers.
Oracle's ongoing stewardship of the Java platform and language is still garnering the occasional spat of criticism from time to time. Much of the disquiet rests on Oracle's plans to bring Java Standard Edition 6 to the end of its natural life. Adrian Bridgwater
Cloud doyen Salesforce.com Tuesday fielded Desk.com, a new on-demand social and mobile help desk platform that’s supposed to let businesses deliver personal customer service by unifying support channels including Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, the phone and the web via a Desk.com Agent Desktop. Basic pricing starts at $49 a month per full-time agent for unlimited usage. Flex pricing runs $1 an hour per part-time agent. Users can reportedly respond to cases themselves on the go, re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases and modify customer information associated with cases.
Some companies get it. Others wander around in the fog and think that it's a "Cloud". In case you've missed it, 2012 has been the year of some amazing strategic moves by Dell. If you think Dell isn't a software vendor, you're dead wrong. Dell "gets it" - SaaS, Software & Cloud. Dell is making some exciting waves in the "solutions" business. Building on the momentum as a result of the acquisition of Perot Systems some years ago and a buying spree where they acquired a host of best-of-breed software solutions such as Boomi (Cloud-based Integration Platform),Dell has just announced a newly created Software Division and has appointed veteran John Swainson as president, reporting to Michael Dell.
Tilera, the wannabe many-core Intel server replacement, said Monday that it’s delivering the expected 16- and 36-core versions of its new 64-bit low-power proprietary TILE-GX processors along with evaluation systems it hopes will give Intel something to worry about. The things should be in volume by mid-March. They’re Tilera’s first 64-bit chips capable of using more memory than its original 32-bit widgets – like 512GB or 1TB. They’ve been shipping in limited quantities – alphas – since September. The start-up claims to have 20 design-wins and 80 “deep” engagements for the GX family that it expects will turn into design-wins – probably this year – because they’re do-or-die mission-critical projects. Forty-seven are in the US, 13 in Europe, and 20 in APAC, mostly China.
Every company should plan regular architecture capability maturity assessments using a model. These should provide a framework that represents the key components of a productive enterprise architecture process. A model provides an evolutionary way to improve the overall process that starts out in an ad hoc state, transforms into an immature process, and then finally becomes a well-defined, disciplined, managed and mature process. The goal is to enhance the overall odds for success of the enterprise architecture by identifying weak areas and providing a defined path towards improvement. As the architecture matures, it should increase the benefits it offers the organization. Architecture maturity assessments help to determine how companies can maximise competitive advantage, identify ways of cutting costs, improve quality of services and reduce time to market. These assessments are undertaken as part of the Enterprise Architecture management.
These past few weeks, I published several blogs pointing out problems with static rule based correlation, their current limitations, their high TCO, etc. Because these solutions have been sold for many years as the end all be all to security problems, it has created false expectations in the industry and among clients. But SIEM as a general discipline holds plenty of promises, let’s not throw the baby with the bathwater.
cVidya Networks, a provider of Revenue Intelligence solutions for Telecom, Media and Entertainment service providers, has announced the release of DRMap, a complete data retention solution that enables CSPs to comply with current regulations and swiftly fulfill law enforcement requests. With its current positioning in the revenue assurance and fraud management spaces, cVidya was able to leverage its capabilities to create a solution which by nature collects richer sets of information as part of existing applications deployed at CSPs. With the necessity to ensure compliance with increasing regulations, such as the EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC requiring CSPs to store data for up to 24 months, it is imperative that CSPs have fast, secure, and compliant data retention systems. According to a leading research firm white paper, the majority of CSPs are spending a lot of time and money trying to adapt their current systems to meet the regulations. cVidya is leveraging Oracle Exadata Database Machine, allowing CSPs to benefit from the extreme performance, speed and scalability offered by Oracle. cVidya's DRMap V1.0 has also achieved Oracle Exadata Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). This demonstrates that cVidya has fully tested and supports DRMap V1.0 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
DS Data Systems UK Ltd. is pleased to announce the release of KonaKart v6.0.0.0, a Java-based eCommerce shopping cart application that provides an extensive set of features to enable retailers to successfully sell their products over the internet. KonaKart is a Java / JSP / XML based solution with comprehensive easy to use java, SOAP, RMI and JSON APIs that allow you to quickly integrate eCommerce functionality into your existing systems. The customizable parts of KonaKart are Open Source and available under the GNU LGPL.
This article introduces the concepts of Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA) using the OSGi Service platform with an example application. The article starts with an introduction to software components, elaborates with an example application, followed by an overview of the OSGi Service platform, and an implementation of the example application using this platform. Components are parts that can be assembled to form a larger system. Electronic components such as ICs (Integrated Circuits) are assembled together to build an electronic system; similarly software components are assembled together to build a software system. Software systems have a static form as well as a dynamic runtime form. Software components can be assembled either in static form or dynamic form. In either case, the software component is an independent unit of development, deployment, and assembly. Using components to build software systems will provide many architectural advantages apart from promoting ease of reuse.
EMC CEO Joe Tucci is gonna keep his eventual replacement waiting a while longer. When the company posted pretty Q4 results the other day Tucci said he won’t be stepping down this year as planned. He said the board asked him to stay into 2013 and that “after much soul-searching” he agreed. “As I’ve said in the past, the board and I fully expect that my successor will come from within the existing, talented and experienced ranks of the EMC management team” – who reportedly all asked him to reconsider his transition plans.
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It would allow organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter. Costs are reduced significantly since one big Internet pipe is not needed.
Joyent’s SmartDataCenter IaaS platform is going to be sold to Italian VARs and service providers by ICOS, an Italian value-added distributor, for private cloud infrastructure or value-added private cloud services. SmartDataCenter’s local storage is supposed to reduce the TCO of cloud data centers. It’s designed to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, a k a SmartMachines, and supports a multi-tenant PaaS. ICOS means to develop its own cloud infrastructure for channel partners too so they don’t have to build their own cloud data center. JoyentCloud.com delivers public cloud services to LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe and Kabam and licenses its cloud software to service providers that include Dell, FirstServer, XYBase, ClusterTech and Uniserve. Its offerings include a Platform-as-a-Service based on Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript development environment that’s been embraced by Microsoft.
When it comes to procurement, any technology or service should be evaluated with a good set of criteria. Executive decisions should not be weighted solely on a single selection criterion such as price. This applies to any cloud computing service as well. The twelve criteria listed below (see Chart 1) forces executives to take a broader review of the many elements of the total cloud computing service, and not just price. Each criteria starts with an R, F, or P which makes it easy to remember the total framework for the Yardstick for Technology Procurement (RFP).
SYS-CON Events announced today that CodeFutures Corporation, the company behind dbShards, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. CodeFutures Corporation, the company behind dbShards, is a leading supplier of database performance and reliability tools that reduce the time and effort required to dramatically increase database scalability and performance. With dbShards, production environments gain scalability, high-availability and easy management of multi-terabyte databases through its Continuous Replication technology, providing an ideal foundation for fast-growing, 24X7 applications.
Amazon’s cloud, which, let’s face it, is still pretty much developer turf, broadened its push into the enterprise Wednesday with the introduction of AWS Storage Gateway, a beta virtual appliance nominally meant to automate enterprise data backup to S3 while creating a comfort level with the cloud among the leery. It’s the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff’s targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service. It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.